Saatchi's emporium: old?

So Charles Saatchi has paid £1 million for Jake and Dinos Chapman's Works from the Chapman Family Collection as the novelty at the heart of his forthcoming County Hall gallery. No surprises there. No other British collector could accommodate the 34-piece installation, and public museums cannot afford so much as the admission ticket to a major Chapman sale. The question is whether the works and the gallery that will house them will make much impact on the fastflowing London art scene. In short, is Charles Saatchi history?

Yes, he is - in both positive and negative ways. He is history because we cannot discuss the past 15 years of art without him. There is hardly an artist of note who has not been touched by him, for good or otherwise. Saatchi's name has become synonymous with the contemporary-art market.

Check out the syllabus of any art school and his catalogues are on the reading list, his shows essential research. In the corridors of the same schools, ambitious young artists debate Saatchi's role with a passion. To each other, they dismiss him as being so Nineties. Secretly, they all crave the financial security that his favourable gaze might bring.

But he's also history because that era is over. The Saatchi decade, as one book title categorises the 1990s, was a period of unprecedented growth and interest in British art. Charles didn't invent it: he understood it, rode the crest of the wave and presented it beautifully and brilliantly. The sector cannot sustain that level of interest without him.

His appetite is still voracious (and not just for Nigella's cooking). He'll put together an insider deal on a million-quid Chapman, but he's equally at home fossicking through Hackney for a piece worth a couple of grand. His reputation was always for bulk buying, but I hear stories of his ruthless pursuit of relatively minor works simply because they fire his imagination.

Collectors, both public and private, tend to get locked into a particular era. They collect intensively for a while, run out of space, then call it a day. Saatchi has not retired, but he needs an aesthetic makeover. He is going to County Hall with an eye on the neighbours.

Even a fraction of Tate Modern's three million visitors would make the shift worthwhile. But there is a paradox in his move: he has to innovate boldly to prove he is still alive, but to make the move pay, he'll have to produce the best-known stuff in his collection, rather than test new ground.

Saatchi's strength was his idiosyncrasy. He bought what he liked, showed it the way he liked, and was answerable to no one. He could buy a dozen paintings in a studio with the taxi meter ticking over outside. He wasn't scared to get it wrong. When he got it right, another chapter was written in the history textbook.

The work he showed was pieced together on a scale never seen in this country. We saw big Bruce Nauman sculptures with their chaotic combination of elements that few collectors would know how to handle. When the Tate started to think through its own

modern-art museum, Saatchi was the enviable precedent.

At Saatchi, we saw minimalist masterpieces by Donald Judd that ran for yards along the walls, when all the Tate had was a grubby little Judd cube with fingerprints all over it. Saatchi showed us those Jeff Koons fish tanks with magically suspended basketballs.

We saw these things years before the museums began to assess them, and the famous Goldsmiths generation of students saw them, too. I can still see the jaws dropping after the long trek from New Cross. And you can see it in their work.

So the biggest influence on what ended up in the Saatchi Collection was the Saatchi Collection. What Saatchi understood better than any art historian was the sheer physical impact of conceptual art. It might account for the fact that he has never shown (or perhaps even bought) a video work. Given that this is the medium of the moment, that's a stunning, but deliberate, omission.

But there has long been another side to Saatchi's collecting process. He is a seller every bit as much as a buyer. Thumb through any current catalogue of sale from the three main auction houses and the biggest seller is Saatchi. Not that this is ever articulated in the provenance. Auction houses love to tell you which collection a work is from - unless it's Saatchi's. Those with a keen eye on the market work backwards and figure it out. Others need only see where there's a gap in a work's recent history. The gap tells you everything.

Dealers sigh wearily as he consigns truckloads out of his East London store every few months. These days, they refuse to sell him the entire exhibition of a particular artist, so that they can retain control of some part of the market. He has clout in New York, but only in London is he an unchallenged kingmaker, and history-maker.

Lately he has been spending relatively little. I don't believe any estimate of the value of his collection since no one has had sight of the inventory. But I am convinced it is less of a collection than a perpetual flow of contemporary practice. He's hanging on to his own history, trying to sustain it beyond its time. I would like to know what still surprises him. The past few years at Boundary Road have not given any sense of that almost ingenuous awe that made the early shows so stunning.

It seems likely that the new Saatchi will showcase the notorious masters of recent years. I hope not. The old Saatchi never showed anything twice; he kept us on our toes.

Damien Hirst's greatest hits will pull queues around the block, but such a show will also kill off our art scene once and for all. County Hall could easily become the Saatchi Mausoleum.